And The Update Is...The Industry Mourns Dolly, AI Music, $11 BILLION in Ticket Fees & Ella Langley Takes Over the Charts

Welcome to And The Update Is, I'm your host Ross Golan and this is the music industry news for the week of August 24th, 2026. Let's start with the sad news. We lost Ali Parton, one of the greatest songwriters, one of the greatest humans ever in the music business. Our thoughts go out to all of those who knew her personally and honestly to anybody who enjoyed her music as much as we did. So sad story there. Just what a legend. Also lost Tim Curry, who was the lead in Rocky Horror Picture Show, which had a major influence on both music movies and musicals. Tough week on that front. Let's get to some other news. Study finds ticket resale practices. Cost fans $11 billion annually. Billion. A Vanderbilt study estimates that ticket brokers add $4.5 billion in resale markups and ticketing fees, adding $6.8 billion in extra costs annually. Man, would it be great if people would look out for the actual fans of music and not just for the corporations who own the ticket resale market. Apple Music. Introduces made-with-AI labels. The streaming service will begin displaying labels on AI-generated music. Labels and distributors are responsible for tagging the content. Well, that's going to get interesting, but we'll see. Still a step in the right direction. SoundCloud now lets artists sell music directly to fans. The new feature allows artists to set their own prices and sell downloadable music directly through SoundCloud with zero commission. That is a huge step. In the independence of both artists and songwriters, obviously songwriters would have to negotiate their internal deal if they're going to get above their normal statutory rate. Luminate launches technology to track AI-generated music. The new system will identify AI-generated songs in Luminate's Kinect platform. For those of you who don't know what Luminate is, that is the organization that the music industry trusts. For actual downloads across different platforms, streams across different platforms, it is the company that aggregates all the numbers that we analyze as an industry. Now, in other news, Warner Chapel Music promotes Gabs Landman to executive vice president of A&R. She's one of my publishers, so she gets a shout out here. Mustard Signs with Mixed. Passion Management. Shout out to Sam French, a friend of ours. Passion Pit signs with Red Light Management. That band's awesome. And Meghan Trainor moves over to UTA for touring after everything that went on this year. We wish her the best as well. Don't forget Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest also. Move over to Adam Harrison and Jeffrey Azoff at Full Stop Management. Congrats Ash on that signing. That's cool. Onto charts. Choosing Texas by Ella Langley is number one on Billboard Hot 100 for the 19th non-consecutive week. That is the official second place to Mariah Carey, All I Want for Christmas. Wild by Cat's Eye debuts at number one on the Billboard 200 chart. And who gets a special congratulations? Me. Why? Because I produced a song called Unlove You. On the physical album. And that album sold 150,000 copies last week. I did it with the great Lara Raj, the wonderful front woman of Cat's Eye. She is very smart, a very good songwriter. And don't forget the one and only Amy Allen. Man is she good. It is so fun to write with her in a room. She makes everything sound better. Die Die continues to be the number one song on Billboard's Global 200. That is the number one song on Billboard's Global 200. you